Conceptions of Need-based Justice in Administrative Behavior

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Kai-Uwe Schnapp
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 240285356

Democratic welfare states redistribute resources based on laws and administrative decrees. Public officials and employees of NGOs implement these regulations on the local level. Project C2 “Conceptions of Need-based Justice in Administrative Behavior” puts forward the following questions: Which public service norms and which conceptions of need-based justice guide the implementation of the respective regulations by public officials and actors in NGOs? What are the effects of those norms on the individual decision-making on the local level? We treat the relevant individuals as experts for decisions on need-based redistribution. During the first working phase of this research group, project B2 demonstrated that using the advice of experts leads to better decisions about the redistribution of resources. With “better”, in this context we mean that more people are levied to an income above subsistence-level income with expert-guided decisions than with non-expert decisions. The above-mentioned need experts are relevant for this project in the sense described earlier. We research their value systems using focus groups with public officials and NGO employees. In addition, we carry out survey-experiments with students of programs in Public Administration and with students from programs not directly related to this profession field (like Law, Business Administration or Sociology). We focus on a) the attitude of all subjects towards heterogeneity in decisions on need-based redistribution and b) the role of the public service norm of impartiality on their handling of heterogeneity.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2104: Needs-Based Justice and Distribution Procedures
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Markus Tepe